Digital Commons Network^™

The Beekeepers, Richard Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

The Beekeepers complements a film/digital video of the same name. It documents my process in creating alternative films/digital videos while pursuing my MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. It starts with my first film/digital video, “Redemption,” and traces my progression over two years culminating with the 25 minute experimental documentary, “The Beekeepers

Find Meaning Make Meaning, Karen Stein

Theses and Dissertations

Employing the designer William Morris as a source of inspiration, this project seeks to explore the call for nature and beauty as a part of our lives. Moreover, it interweaves the necessity for experience of the sensual world (the five senses) with the cerebral world (a requisite to igniting the internal imagination)—a concept embodied in the form of the book. It advocates a redefining of the book as an imagination sculpture (the external and the internal) reflecting this new definition.

A Space For Absence, Timothy Dalton

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the evolution of my work created during my two years of study at Virginia Commonwealth University. Although I touch upon my influences what I am writing is a reflection after the fact that does not necessarily encompass my original intent or inspirations for these works. I find my inspiration from personal discoveries within my daily life. Light flickering through the rails of a fence as I walk by makes me more aware of my body's movement in space. Watching the steady condensation of water droplets forming on a fountain creates a moment of pause within the …

The Open Road, Bryan Condra

Theses and Dissertations

In our journeys on the open road, we travel through a landscape of visual imagery composed of patterns, rhythms and a spectrum of changing colors. Our previous experiences, mental and physical attitudes and expectations, shape our perceptions. By visually interpreting and presenting my experiences of the journey on the open road I hoped to tell a story of how the open road energizes the creative spirit. My goal was to explore how the landscape is altered by motion and speed as we pass through it, and how the journey can be experienced in various ways. I wanted to investigate and …

Self-Reference Through White Space In Graphic Design, Can Birand

Theses and Dissertations

In the graphic design, successful use of white space provides the designed object with a strong reference to its material quality and internal structure. Showing the paper breaks the wall between the design and the viewer, and gives the audience a better understanding of the construction of graphic design. White space is devoid representation, which leads the work to become completely honest about its materiality. This project explores different methods and processes for creating aesthetic/conceptual integrity in graphic design by using white space as a primary device.

After August: Museums As Mirrors, William Pinholster

Theses and Dissertations

The After August Museum collects and exhibits an open, user-generated body of content. Its primary objective is to help heal the post-Katrina Lower Ninth Ward community. It is respectful and considerate of the area's established traditions, present concerns, and future goals. The museum assumes multiple shapes and plays multiple roles as it acts as the center of the transitioning community.

Making Time, Christine Coffey

Theses and Dissertations

We are living in an age where the quantity of information has exceeded its quality. No doubt the digital and information revolutions have provided the world with countless positive improvements, but they have also increased the speed at which we live and work to the detriment of the heath of our world. This project explores ways in which designers can aid in an effort to slow down in order to reinvigorate a more sustainable graphic design product.

Typography As Performance: Bringing The Stage Into The Design Process, Ann Ford

Theses and Dissertations

Graphic design is historically a visual language consisting of text and image composed for the purposes of sending messages in print format. The voice of graphic design is typography—structuring and arranging letter forms into visual language. Over the past two decades, new communication formats such as motion and interaction have frequently been related to performance. My intention, however, is to explore how performance can influence typography in two and three dimensions, and even in digital environments.

Fundamentals In Nature, Andrea Quam

Theses and Dissertations

This project explores innovative methodologies for design education. It is an investigation of teaching design fundamentals in an outdoor classroom.

What Is A Partition?, Lee Dijoseph

Theses and Dissertations

Buildings from the nineteenth century are rich with history and tradition in their materials,design and construction. Over the past few years in Richmond, many of the formerly vacant buildings have been converted into residential “lofts”. These spaces have the potential to teach and serve us in a way we could never duplicate today. The space we live in has the power to determine how well we function. I believe this is one of the keys to happiness. I like to think of these buildings holistically in terms of past, present, and future . I will supplement the space with partitions …

Mods: Collaboration And Play In Design, Margaret O'Saben

Theses and Dissertations

Located in Richmond, Virginia, MO Design is a small design/build company founded by Molly O’Saben. Ms. O’Saben received her bachelor’s degree in Craft & Material Studies and her master’s in Interior Environments from Virginia Commonwealth University. MO Design was founded in 2010 with a team of fellow alumni from VCU.

We make objects that inspire inventiveness. Our reconfigurable components offer our clients the unique ability to adapt their environments to life’s ever-changing needs.

We make MODs: Make your Own Designs.

Our products are for people who appreciate efficient spaces, are open to exploring possibilities, and like to play. Just as …

Corporate Housing And Training, Cojo Gerardo Del

Theses and Dissertations

Corporate Housing & Training is a hybrid project that promotes the future use of living-and-working environments in the same site offering the amenities of a hotel, apartment and an office in one. The challenge of approaching this type of project is the way the program works and how it flows together with different users and different needs without even getting out of the building at the same time. This project helps the actual local and global needs because it would be a big impact for the traveling executives and companies by promoting business, exchange of ideas, and socializing; due to …

Healing, Learning And Play, Kangana Bhatnagar

Theses and Dissertations

Research suggests that the first five years of life are critical for building the foundation for children’s success throughout their schooling and life. Throughout these first years of life there are a number of essential windows of opportunity during which certain kinds of stimuli are needed to help the brain develop and maintain critical connections necessary for learning. This project is a unification of a Child Development Center and a therapeutic center. This center includes children who suffer from bereavement; a broken home, death of a parent or child abuse. These children are provided with therapy by a specialist, and …

Angels And Demons: Christina Rossetti’S Goblin Market As A Social Critique Of The Victorian Ideal Of The “Angel In The House” And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Response To That Ideal, Melissa Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration …

In An Expression Of The Inexpressible: Even This Title Is Stolen, But I Chose It, Carmen Alis Mcleod

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a tour through an imaginary building that contains the work I have completed in the last two years at Virginia Commonwealth University. The body of the text provides a discussion of specific paintings as well as more general themes related to painting and art. The discussion includes thoughts on futility, desire, schism, the leap, collage, photography, materiality, painting, image, and landscape. The second part of the text is an abstract statement about the paintings included in the thesis show, Splinter Paintings.

Green Beans - The Neighborhood Co-Op, Cooking, And Nutritional Living Center, Amee Ricketts

Theses and Dissertations

Taking the time to learn how to eat healthfully and prepare nutritious meals has become a problem in today's modern living. 66 percent of American adults are overweight and 19 percent of American children are overweight1. Constrained by the demands of work, raising families, and other daily commitments leaves little time for taking care of one's nutritional needs in a simple, healthy, and efficient manner. This thesis strives to achieve a well designed neighborhood center that warmly invites customers to learn about the importance of nutrition and the effects our food choices have on our overall health, how to shop …

One Hundred And Fifty Percent Elasticity, Eli Mikael Kessler

Theses and Dissertations

The sculptural environments I create immerse the viewer in a decrepit vaudevillian past. The sculptures allude to narratives within Community Theater as well as the Drag Show. Making becomes an act; manipulating materials such as synthetic hair and paint are associated with the guise of the makeup artist. Frantic rehearsal logic prevails as a dress is repurposed into a male giant's costume and window blinds are used to construct a boat's deck. This collusion asks the viewer to transgress the boundary of the stage, becoming a voyeur privileged to the world of exiled props and role reversal.

Magic, Mystery, Illusion And Magic, Alexis Semtner

Theses and Dissertations

This document vaguely describes what happened to me and my paintings during my time spent at VCU.

A Science & Mathematics Magnet School At Maymont, Sarah Shamus Nakfoor

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in the idea that schools should be designed to offer individualized learning."A Science & Mathematics Magnet School at Maymont" explores a type of school that is becoming more familiar and accessible. By allowing students who have an interest in excelling in school and preparing for their future careers to come together and meet one another and experience aneducation that might not otherwise be available can be beneficial in many ways. In most cases, because of the funding required for such specialized schools, class sizes are reduced to meet budgets and the schools are opened to the community …

Moments Of Absorption, Sarah K. Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

Moments of Absorption explores the conceptual and visual themes that are presented in my MFA thesis exhibition. The research looks into the absorption of the nude subject, the gestures that communicate this absorption, and the domestic space as a stage for the presentation of these gestures. This work investigates a tension between the theatrical and the natural as represented by images.

If Your Love Were A Grain Of Sand Mine Would Be A Universe Of Beaches, Valerie Anne Molnar

Theses and Dissertations

Each stitch is a piece of me that I give, a moment of my life and a unit of my love, meticulously culminated into a universal visual language. The optimist in me knits for the cause, while my formalist counterpart works to make the images that sell my thoughts. I knit for the lovers.I make these objects as a practice and a confirmation of my optimism. I make these images to communicate and persuade as a serious contender while at the same time retaining my own optimism and sanity by promising to never take myself too seriously.

Spark Gap, Lillian Cox-Richard

Theses and Dissertations

"Spark Gap" is an invisible electrical force made visible in spaces between things. This usually describes the space of air between two conductors; a non-conductive gap in an otherwise complete electric circuit, across which a quick luminous disruptive electrical discharge occurs. This interstitial space is the distance between two ideas, arced with a running leap. The arc can also be the difference between two things, a gap that becomes apparent only when the two are held in close proximity. In my thesis exhibition, "Spark Gap," a sea urchin shaped orb sits atop a tower of ladders. The orb is broken …

Lighting The Box,Daylighting As The Primary Organizer In Multifamily Housing, Sara Lovette

Theses and Dissertations

This project started out as program for multi-family housing with a need for natural light, then, it changed. Through countless studies, it became evident that what started as an animal made up of bones and tissues was really just the vessel for the animal's soul. Light is the soul of design. The program represents the tissue and bones of the animal that is design.In this project two paths were taken. The first being pragmatic, the design bound by the program. Where in the second, the concept, light, beats up the program and ultimately makes for an inspiring place to live.

On Zeitgeist, James Sham

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration into the possibilities and repercussions of articulating zeitgeist, that is, the spirit of our current age. The parameters and ramifications of such a project are, in this writing, analyzed in reference to the notion of historicity, and the narrative gaze that it perpetuates. The mechanism of canonization, and a discourse's capacity to be viral are examined.

Lucky Strike Branch Library, Vanessa Yvonne Vinsant

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project is an examination of how design can reinvigorate interest in reading through the creation of a branch library. The primary focus of this study is to generate a space that successfully binds intellectual interests, social and economic groups to re-establish community.

Organizing Around A Center: A Design Incubator And Business Center, Mindy Carter

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the development of an interdisciplinary design incubator and community business center in Richmond, Virginia through the adaptive reuse of a retired, historic school building. In contrast to the deteriorating conditions of Patrick Henry School, renewed growth abounds in its extraordinary site surroundings—the 105 acres of Forest Hill Park, which serves as the virtual backyard of the school building. This dualism provided a prime opportunity for discovering the design possibilities in connecting a built space to its physical surroundings and for giving meaningful new life to an abandoned space.

Greenlife: A Sustainable Retail Space, Veronica J. Ledford

Theses and Dissertations

GreenLife is the name of the retail interior design project that embodies this thesis. Using interior design as a medium to influence customers,I sought to create an environment that promotes a connection to nature and an awareness of creative possiblities within the context of a store. It addresses the problem of personal social responsiblity by using shopping, a dominant activity in the western world, as a tool for change. As a project, GreenLife attempts to answer three questions: How does design inform cultural experience? How can a connection with nature inform consumerism? Can a store transcend its purpose from filling …

Grace Street Senior Center, Virginia Brockett

Theses and Dissertations

Societal structure has changed through the decades to reflect a contemporary interest in youth culture. The nuclear family, where generations lived under one roof no longer exists, leaving the elderly on the periphery of the family structure. Where once grandparents, parents and children all cohabitated, now the oldest family members are relegated to solitary retirement and aging alone. Studies have shown that "depression in the elderly is more likely to lead to suicide. Elderlywhite men are at greatest risk, with suicide rates in people ages 80 to 84 more than twice that of the general population. The National Institute of …

Early Intervention, Research And Therapy Center For Children With Autism, Nicole Marie Caccavo

Theses and Dissertations

This book documents a design study and creative project undertaken toward the fulfillment of a Masters of Fine Arts Degree in Interior Environments at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. This book documents a year long accumulation of study and research done toward the development of an early intervention, therapy and research center for children with autism. This creative project demonstrates how an environment can be a catalyst for social interaction, way finding, therapy, and intervention. The goal was to design a space that would be multi-functional and also benefit the surrounding community. This design study will explain how colors …

Des Perdues: The Precariousness Of Loss, Alissa Grace Davis

Theses and Dissertations

The majority of losses that take place in a day are not large, or sad, they are built almost entirely on behaviors and systems that have nothing to do with loss. Most of these, I discovered, are the result of deliberate carelessness. The word loss is as difficult to define as truth, but its variation is what makes it so interesting and evocative. It is not, and never has been, a definition of loss that I seek: it is not enough to simply say I lost this person or that place, we must consider what is left and what can …